Month: July 2018

Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence. Cal Newport:

As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note” [T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction — driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration — is one of the most robust findings in sociology.”

But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.

Here’s a summary of what they found: Contrary to what’s predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc’d 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.

via Slashdot
Open Offices Make You Less Open

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Video game nerds, sit back, relax, and enjoy Dave Freeman’s hour-long commercial break featuring dozens of TV ads for classic games from Pac-Man to Space Invaders from the Atari 2600 to the Intellivision. The Toys ‘R’ Us music almost made us cry.

via The Awesomer
’80s Video Game Commercials

Price: $50  | Buy | Link

Protect yourself from those nasty bugs wherever you are with Thermacell’s Radius Zone Mosquito Repellent. It’s a rechargeable device that creates a 110sqft scent-free zone of protection against mosquitoes. It lasts up to 6h per charge, and each refill lasts up to 40h.

via The Awesomer
Thermacell Radius Mosquito Repellent

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BananenBuurman takes us on another fun ride on one of his LEGO railway constructions, this time taking a trip through his Grandpa’s factory, as tools, wood, and workbenches loom large. Want your own LEGO railway? Hit Trixbrix, and use code “crazybananen” for 10% off.

via The Awesomer
360º LEGO Train Factory Ride

They say you become just like the company you keep. Therefore, picking and choosing friends is one of life’s most underrated skills.

Friends make or break you. The right group of friends will help you get through life and succeed while the wrong ones will hold you down and potentially destroy you.

Moving through life, you’ll encounter countless people, many of whom you will call your “friend” at one point in life. Unfortunately, not every friend stays. In fact, the average length of a friendship is said to only be around seven years.

Most often, friends come and go but there are few who stick around for better or worse.

Not everyone who sticks is good for the relationship. Sometimes you must make the difficult choice of removing toxic people for your personal well-being.

Recognize these five signs to help you make this choice.

You Feel Drained Each Time You Hang Out

When you’ve been friends for a while, you’ve likely had your fair share of good and bad moments. Friends are there for you during bad times and vice versa. But this doesn’t excuse friends who always seem to suck the energy out of you every time.

Friends like these are toxic. They are usually negative, judgmental, and seem to be using you as a personal therapist to deal with their issues. This is extremely draining.

Cut these types of “friends” off before their negativity rubs off on you. Have some respect for yourself. You are not a personal punching bag.

See Also: 8 Types of Toxic Friends That Are Holding Your Happiness Hostage

You Can’t Compromise on Personal Values

It’s necessary to have friends from all walks of life because they offer you different views and help you grow. However, there are friends who you will never see eye-to-eye with.

Initially, it may not be a problem dealing with these friends but as you move further in life, your personal differences may just be too big to ignore.

Compromising on things like what to eat or what to watch is one thing. But when you are dealing with differences in life choices, you can’t afford to be with someone who contradicts you too often.

You’re the Only One Doing the Work

It takes two to tango. Otherwise, you’re just dancing with yourself. The same theory applies to friendship.

When you start realizing that you’re the only one making any effort to hang out or talk, that’s a red flag that your friend doesn’t value your friendship as much as you do.

Life happens and sometimes we become busy and burdened by responsibilities. True friends will try to spend time with you. If they can’t do that, then it’s best to move on.

You Can’t Be Yourself Around Them

It can take a while for people to become comfortable. When you met your friends for the first time, you probably felt wary at first but once you gained each other’s trust, it was smooth sailing.

But if there are still people you don’t feel comfortable with even after knowing for a while, you should move on.

You can’t develop good chemistry with everyone. And it’s not a true friendship if you can’t be yourself around them.

One of You Develops Unrequited Romantic Feelings

This is the toughest friendship to end because neither of you did anything wrong unless you count “catching feelings” wrong. When you or your friend becomes hopelessly smitten but the other doesn’t reciprocate, it becomes an awkward situation.

This is painful because you are ending what was once a great friendship.

Holding on will only be more tragic. Save yourselves from future drama and quit while you’re ahead. Maybe, when feelings aren’t as hot anymore, you can rekindle your friendship.

Identifying which friends to keep is a tough process but keep in mind these key points. Chances are, you are already subconsciously doing it. Being more aware of your feelings towards your friends and relationships can help you refine the company you keep.

The post 5 Signs You Need to Start Removing Toxic People appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

via Dumb Little Man – Tips for Life
5 Signs You Need to Start Removing Toxic People

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the unfortunate shift of the web from being more decentralized to being about a few giant silos and I expect to have plenty more to say on the topic in the near future. But I’m thinking about this again after Andy Baio reminded me that this past weekend was five years since Google turned off Google Reader. Though, as he notes, Google’s own awful decision making created the diminished use that allowed Google to justify shutting it down. Here’s Andy’s tweeted thread, and then I’ll tie it back to my thinking on the silo’d state of the web today:

Many people have pointed to the death of Google Reader as a point at which news reading online shifted from things like RSS feeds to proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It might seem odd (or ironic) to bemoan a move by one of the companies now considered one of the major silos for killing off a product, but it does seem to indicate a fundamental shift in the way that Google viewed the open web. A quick Google search (yeah, yeah, I know…) is not helping me find the quote, but I pretty clearly remember, in the early days of Google, one of Larry Page or Sergey Brin saying something to the effect of how the most important thing for Google was to get you off its site as quickly as possible. The whole point of Google was to take you somewhere else on the amazing web. Update It has been pointed out to me that the quote in question most likely is part of Larry Page’s interview with Playboy in which he responded to the fact that in the early days all of their competitors were "portals" that tried to keep you in with the following:

We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.

Somewhere along the way, that changed. It seems that much of the change was really an overreaction by Google leadership to the "threat" of Facebook. So many of Google’s efforts from the late 2000s until now seemed to have been designed to ward off Facebook. This includes not just Google’s multiple (often weird) attempts at building a social network, but also Google’s infatuation with getting users to sign in just to use its core search engine. Over the past decade or so, Google went very strongly from a company trying to get you off its site quickly to one that tried to keep you in. And it feels like the death of Reader was a clear indication of that shift. Reader started in the good old days, when the whole point of an RSS reader was to help you keep track of new stuff all over the web on individual sites.

But, as Andy noted above, part of what killed Reader was Google attempting desperately to use it as a tool to boost Google+, the exact opposite of what Google Reader stood for in helping people go elsewhere. I don’t think Google Reader alone would have kept RSS or the open web more thriving than it is today, but it certainly does feel like a landmark shift in the way Google itself viewed its mission: away from helping you get somewhere else, and much more towards keeping you connected to Google’s big data machine.

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via Techdirt
The Death Of Google Reader And The Rise Of Silos

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How to Make Everything shares a brief history of fireworks, and how they work. Then he gathers the ingredients he needs to make them from scratch, including bat droppings. The resulting fireworks made for a pretty quiet Fourth of July, but technically they still worked.

via The Awesomer
Making Fireworks from Scratch

The Fourth of July is a little different today at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. From a report:

Instead of fireworks, 500 Intel Shooting Star drones will take to the sky to perform an aerial routine in honor of the holiday and the base’s 75th anniversary. These are the same drones that preformed at Disney World, the Super Bowl and the Olympics. One person controls the fleet of drones thanks to a sophisticated control platform that pre-plans the route of each drone. Intel engineers told me that the system can control an unlimited amount of drones. In the version I saw, the drones used GPS to stay in place and the drones lacked any collision detection sensors.

via Slashdot
500 Intel Drones To Replace Fireworks Above Travis Air Force Base For Fourth of July

via Planet MySQL
Linux OS Tuning for MySQL Database Performance

There are some skills you hope you never need to use, but having them could be a matter of life and death: welcome to bleeding control.

BleedingControl.org, an group begun by the American College of Surgeons, has successfully campaigned for a national Stop The Bleed Day; the organization believes that many lives could be saved if ordinary citizens had some basic information on how to stop traumatic bleeding in an emergency situation. Reporter and certified EMT Tim Mak rounded up the most critical points on the day dedicated to bleeding awareness in an effort to teach more people how to save lives.

According to Mak, 20 percent of people who die from bleeding could have been saved with this care, and bleeding to death is the top cause of preventable death. Here’s what you need to know.

What To Look For

It is possible to bleed to death from smaller wounds, but people who bleed out often do so because they have cut an artery. You will know an artery has been severed if blood is spurting from the wound and bright red. Also, if blood is pooling, if the injured person is unconscious, or if you’re seeing a partial or full amputation. A person with a severed artery can die in 2-3 minutes.

How To Intervene

Mak provided a step-by-step guide which may seem simple, but in a scenario where someone is massively bleeding, you might be a little panicked. Simple rules help.

First, make sure you’re not stepping into danger. Then, call 911. Even if you’re about to stop the bleeding successfully, you want trained medical professionals to get there ASAP. Then you find the injury and apply pressure to stop the blood loss.

You may not have a tourniquet on hand, but if you do, tie it off between the blood flow and the exit wound, above the injury. If not, or if the wound is too big to be contained by a tourniquet, grab a clean cloth or hemostatic (bleeding control) gauze, if available. Pack the wound and hold it down with steady pressure. You’re trying to close off the artery and keep it closed until help can arrive. Mak advises people apply as much pressure as possible, because even if the injury is severe, the artery is fairly deep inside the body. You need to press hard to reach it and shut it off.

Finally, if you have the presence of mind to do so, mark the time the tourniquet or pressure was applied. This is useful information for medical professionals, as there are dangers to leaving tourniquets on too long.

These are the basics, but if you want to take a hands on class for free, Bleeding Control offers them all over the country. As Mak wrote, there’s nothing like hands-on training when it’s time to step up.

via Lifehacker
Tourniquet Use Should Be One of Your Basic First Aid Skills